KENSINGTON GARDENS
By Iván Gonzalo Rodríguez
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
what all of us will be swept into
MARK STRAND
There will be a summer that is the last
and it will be identical to this one.
The same light unable to decide to leave,
the same pond learning the sky, unable to hold it,
and the two of us, spending it as if there were more to spare.
That is why I look at you now
with the eyes of someone who has already come back alone
and, by looking at you this way, I have you twice.
My love, in London
the benches have the dead sitting on them.
I read a plaque,
and the wood has its ribs,
the rain a surname,
and someone we never saw
makes room for us.
People who loved this shade and no longer can,
who asked for a phrase to be engraved,
to leave it out in the rain,
and trust the moss to do the rest.
In their love we sit to invent our own;
for a while we watch over their forgetting.
Squirrels ate from your palm
over an engraved name.
Life never knew.
Peter Pan smiled, untouched.
I preferred your hand.
Dawn comes so early here, this June,
and you hide from me
in the salt at the nape of your neck,
in your can of Coca-Cola Zero
sweating on the grass,
in the way you say
my name when you think I cannot hear you.
I do not know how to promise you forever.
I know how to promise you this very long afternoon, and the next,
until the day
when the light remains on only one side of the bench.
One of us will outlive the other
and will carry the absurdity
of speaking in the plural.
It will be enough for the bench to creak a little,
for the rain to fall
and not entirely erase this being together,
one more plaque, still unengraved.
There will be a summer that is the last.
I think of this, and fasten your backpack.
And if I am the one left on that side,
I will have to come back here and sit,
to tell the still water that you passed through,
that you felt the heat, that you laughed,
that you were gold against the green,
and that some ordinary man,
in a land
that was not his,
loved you, and there was still sun,
and still, as I write this,
there is.
Bio: Iván Gonzalo Rodríguez (Madrid, 1991) is a Higher Technician in International Trade, Transport, and Logistics. He is currently studying Philosophy at UNED and pursuing a Master’s in Strategic Business Analytics at EAE Business School.
Author’s Note: “Kensington Gardens” grew out of a trip my wife and I took to London last June. Wandering through the park, we noticed that many of the benches carry small engraved plaques — a memorial scheme that lets people dedicate a bench to someone they’ve lost, with a name, a date, and sometimes a single line. We found ourselves reading them one by one and resting on strangers’ benches, and I kept thinking that this little plaque, left out in the rain, might one day be all that remains of a whole life together — a kind of small cenotaph. The poem began there: the thought of having to face the death of the person you love, and being the one left behind to sit and go on speaking in the plural.
